Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 244, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1916 — PRAIRIE DOGS INVADE CITY [ARTICLE]

PRAIRIE DOGS INVADE CITY

Mysterious Couple Take Up Life in Kansas City Business District and Make Friends. Kansas Cjty. —Without any visible means of support, and with only enough furniture and luggage to start light housekeeping, two Kansas prairie dogs took lodging under a wall here last spring. A shy, retiring couple, they seemed to shun society. They were never at home to callers. “But sometimes, on sunny afternoons, the employees of the printing company' next door could see the little animals emerge from their hole under the wall and play among the rubbish and fragments of old pavement in the yard. By'and by the prairie dogs learned the printers meant no term, and accepted small favors, such as bunches of sweet grass, -nuts and -apples, from them. No one knows where the prairie dogs came from. One man said they escaped from a circus menagerie. Another held the theory they had run away from someone who had tried to tame them and make them into household pets. At any rate, there they are, next door to Kansas City’s business district. The appearance of strangers on their doorstep Is a signal for retirement to the depths of their hole-in-the-wall. A photographer waited more than an hour to get a glimpse of the prairie dogs. Finally he was compelled to take the picture from the interior of the printshop, thrusting the camera through the window.